Just thought I'd post these for people's amusement and perhaps to encourage those who are having trouble.

Firstly, I should mention that I've installed, without problem, several times in several different ways without difficulty.
However, the other day, decided to try installing from scratch on an older box--K6 450 with 132 Megs of RAM--but slower than one would expect--I think something's damaged in the box somewhere, but at this point, don't care enough to track it down--will probably just get a new MB at some point.

Anyway, on the first attempt, everything seemed fine but it wouldn't boot--hrrm, thought I, perhaps because I'm booting from RH's version of Grub, and it doesn't recognize xfs. So, decided, since I had it running on XFS on another box, I'd go again, and this time do Reiserfs. So, in the midst of emerge system, my cable company lost the connection. Ok. Keep in mind that a stage one install on this is an overnighter, due to the slow speed of the box (not the Internet connection, which is cable).

So, I said to myself, Self, why don't we just put in the old binary CD (which I wish they hadn't dropped) and do an upgrade. Did that--however, running etc-update (from the gentoolkit--a great tool if you're not familiar with it, similar to FreeBSD's mergemaster)I blithely overwrote various and sundry files--upon reboot got a failure on SSH, eth0, etc, due to permissions.

At this point, I really had to laugh. The happy ending is that I once again, as it was late by then, decided to reinstall from a stage 1 again which went without problem. When I woke up this morning, everything was dory-hunky.

The only lesson, I suppose, from this, is be careful with etc-update. Anyway, thought I'd post this to either give people a laugh or encourage newcomers who are having trouble--I'm not really a newcomer, to Linux or this distro, and I had plenty of troubles on this last attempt
Scott